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Much has been made of Kurzweil's idea that computers will eventually overtake the raw processing power of the human brain. I wonder what will happen economically if/when software market algorithms become more efficient than the distributed human-driven algorithms of today. (And I would wager that the latter will happen well before the former.)

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Software algorithms already are a lot better than humans at technical analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis) by almost any measure.

There is still some way until they are there in fundamental analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis). I think there are some pretty good opportunities in automated fundamental analysis and trading, though. If I had the capital I'd build a trading bot which traded on the basis of automatic news analysis.

I would love to do that too. Here's a head start ("Machine-readable economic indicators from the lockups to your trading algorithm"): http://www.needtoknownews.com/

For more on that, you might enjoy Charlie Stross' "Accelerando": he discusses lots of awesome singularity topics, including so-called Economics 2.0. He posts on HN as cstross.

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